David Frum: ‘Is Vladimir Putin Another Sean Hannity’ And Giving Trump Misinformation Over The Phone?

Conservative commentator David Frum expressed serious concerns about where President Donald Trump is getting his information. Speaking on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Frum worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be feeding propaganda directly to Trump.

“One of the most disturbing comments from the President this week was about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979,” CNN host Brian Stelter said. He pointed to some newspaper articles about Trump spreading Soviet or pro-Putin propaganda.

“Here’s the thing, the nightly newscasts didn’t even talk about this. Fox didn’t even talk about it the night it happened. David, I fear there is so much BS slipping through that , unless you’re a news junky, you don’t even know what he’s saying is crazy,” Stelter said.

“I don’t agree with that. I think it does accumulate,” Frum said. “Any particular story doesn’t get checked but the sense that President’s word is not trustworthy, that the things he says are not true – that’s an impression that has consolidated.”

“We talk so much about the Trump base that we forget you can’t govern from your base,” Frum said. “Your base can save you from impeachment, that’s probably true, but it can’t fund $5 billion for a project. For that you need to get a bigger chunk of the country.

“I understand a little bit why the networks stayed away from that Soviet propaganda story” Frum said. “Because the fact that Trump got another thing wrong in history, that’s not news. It’s not a fact check story, what happened there. What happened there was, it opened a speculative question. How did this particular piece of disinformation get in the President’s head?”

“That’s something you can’t report, you can only surmize,” Frum said. “We know that the President and Vladimir Putin have a lot of phone conversations, many more than have been disclosed. Both the President and Vladimir Putin have said that. Is Vladimir Putin another Sean Hannity, another person with whom President Trump has conversations that are not known to very many people and that put ideas in his mind? That’s the thing that was raised by that slip. And that’s such a dark and terrible possibility that you don’t want to deal with it, unless you’re really sure of what looks like it may be true, but you don’t know for a fact it’s true.”